Revision as of 13:10, 18 October 2010

Tutorial Factbox

Time to replay

2 hours

Example Distro

SUSE Linux 11.3

Type

HowTo

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This describes the potential of using a virtual machine to contain development, for testing system level KDE tools like KDM without mucking up the rest of your system. Also, virtual machine snapshots can be shared with casual developers so they can have an up to date, rich environment for their minor fixes.

In the included example, a person sets up KDE trunk on a Suse 11.3 Linux Virtual Machine.

Basically nothing special except using root account directly.. And it is in a virtual machine, Note that the build requirements are moving targets so examples are all but useless.

We use KVM because it is faster than other free alternatives, and can use multiple processors
(You will need to have a CPU that supports virtualization, cheapernewer computers have cpus that dont advertise if they have this feature or not so you may need to do some homework)

Virtual Machine Setup

Create a KVM virtual machine. KDE 4 fits into 10 GB minimum, I recommend 40GB, one partition. As much ram as you can spare, You will need at least 1GB ram for the virtual machine, 4 doesnt hurt if you have it, install SUSE Linux 11.3.

You will need to set your SUSE CD as your virtual machine's cdrom.

setup for SSH

To be able to log in to your VM using ssh, stop and disable the firewall: